I am seeing these relations in a little bit of a foggy way. What I mean is if I use airbase-ng with wlan0 it creates my at0 interface and my wlan0 interface becomes PROMISC.I can bring my at0 up start DHCP on at0, route the traffic through eth0 and everything runs fine; However a few questions are in order and I have been searching like a mad man to understand the relation here.

This would not be considered an ad-hoc network right?

if all I want to do is create an access point with Internet connectivity could I just bridge at0 with eth0?

why does it need wlan0 to run in PROMISC mode? is that in fact what is pushing out the signal? I don't see how it's being used

I can see how I could use this to connect other computers to a wireless network....is this the most productive way? if I had a desktop with no wifi card could I run an Ethernet cable to the nic card on my laptop and route traffic through it out to the wireless network, that is from eth0 to wlan0? yes or no?..........bridge connection maybe?

and finally is there a way to see where the bandwidth is going on my network, I am the admin so I can Telnet into my network and log in via the net and that's well and good but is therea NetFlow alternative for routers running a Linux kernel. I don't care to sniff the traffic so much as I would like to see Bandwidth usage. But actually if I am physically connected to my silly little router could I sniff the traffic without mac flooding or arp poisoning. Could I telnet in and switch the port I am physically connected to, to run in PROMISC mode, or something like that?

I know it's a lot but I think it illustrates where I am at with all this (including my spelling), reading man page after man page forum searching from hell ridiculous you Tube videos

yes or no answers help a lot, short answers, anything at all...... Thanks.

As far as I know configuring the wireless adapter into promiscuous mode is normal. This allows the wireless adapter to pass all traffic to the CPU and is used for sniffing. As you see a virtual adapter is created. airbase-ng is part of aircrack-ng which are tools used for penetration testing, cracking and analysis . No need to run airbase or any of the tools to create router traffic from your wireless to wired adapter.

by enabling IP forwarding you can router traffic between the two. What distribution/version are you running?